THE TWO VAYNES by L.P. Hartley
“I was Vayne’s stooge. His stooge. . . .”
This is sort of dopplegänger story, or one about a man and his vanity. But it never takes off like the the hide and seek in its comradely, sometimes vengeful, Hartley story as its dopplegänger story called THE TRAVELLING GRAVE, although the Vaynes’ “temene” or “temenos” meme and metaphor of garden statues (“gods and goddesses, nymphs and satyrs,” etc. “ gathering to themselves the coming darkness: perhaps they had never really let it go.”) as supplemented by a a booby-trap bath as a lift shaft become a story’s mass hysteria of a gathered gestalt that, in turn, is a real hoot and a half.
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My reviews of THE TRAVELLING GRAVE AND OTHER STORIES: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/04/the-travelling-grave-and-other-stories-by-l-p-hartley/
My reviews of separate older horror stories: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/07/13/separate-horror-stories-from-many-years-ago/
THERE WILL BE MORE LPH STORY REVIEWS IN THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW…
SOMEONE IN THE LIFT by L.P. Hartley
This is a somewhat shocking story of a little boy taken to a hotel for Christmas by his parents, a boy who had never seen a lift before. And this one with a see-through gate, and he often sees someone shadowy coming down in it who turns out to be nobody. But when he is with his father waiting for the lift, he does not see that ‘someone’.
Until his father dresses up as Father Christmas!
It evokes the sort of nightmares I once had as a little boy about the time when this story was said to have been first published in the 1950s.
(cf the lift shaft as bath in THE TWO VAYNES!)
A SUMMONS by L.P. Hartley
“The ridiculous acorn-shaped appendage to the blind-cord no longer flapped its eddying elliptical movement.”
But then “a thought came to me”, perhaps an autonomous Hartley thought like a gramophone record that kept extending (tap-tap-tap its recurrent glitch), yes, extending the waking state of the narrator of this brief work, a thought about his little sister who sleeps next door who often expended her own not-being-put-to-bed by unfinished small-talk sentences, like telling him that she would tap on his wall if she was in danger of being murdered, thus indefinitely extending an otherwise brief work by such speculation and dilemma about going or not going to her rescue when he hears the tap-tap-tap! Perhaps that explains the earlier stream of speculation about a fly in his room that is a pestilent pest…
W.S. by LP Hartley reviewed here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/18/w-s-by-l-p-hartley/
THE WAITS
“At that moment the front-door bell rang. To preserve the character of the house, which was an old one, they had retained the original brass bell-pull. When it was pulled the whole house seemed to shudder audibly, with a strangely searching sound, as if its heart-strings had been plucked, while the bell itself gave out a high yell that split into a paroxysm of jangling.”
A family of four, two children, the mother, and the capitalist father, all around the table on Christmas Eve, presents having been financed or chosen in different ways by each of them for the others, are interrupted by what they tell us is a man and boy singing carols at the front door, and as in the Railway Children, they eventually take the father away because how ever many bobs there are they are not enough. But I doubt the rest of it. Rest you. Unless you’re also people like the waits. Or long time gone astray.
FALL IN AT THE DOUBLE by L.P. Hartley
“…written, printed rather. White over white, very hard to decipher….”
I once lived in a house where the floorboards of the stairs had been worn down, and I was told this was due to soldiers, billeted in my house during the war, walking up and down on the then bare boards in their army boots! So imagine my frisson at this unmitigated ghost story wherein similar conditions prevailed! And I loved the play on words with the title, and the oblique circumstances that happened to Philip, the central character, and the ambiguity of his factotum’s intentions at the end, soon after Philip seeing “only the moon shining as innocently as that de-virginated satellite can shine.”